People Australia

William John (Billy) Wallace (1869-1944) painter, trade union official and Communist

Birth: 9 August 1869 at Milton, Glasgow, Scotland, son of Andrew Wallace (1848-1883), tinner, and Agnes Lynas (1851-1936). Marriage: 17 October 1893 at Brisbane, Queensland, to Edith Mary Ward (1873-1966). They had three daughters and four sons. Death: 19 February 1944 in his residence at Highgate Hill, Brisbane. 

• Arrived in Brisbane with his widowed mother and siblings aboard the Merkara on 8 April 1885.
• A pioneer member of South Brisbane Workers’ Political Organisation (later known as Australian Labor Party).
• Previously vice president, he was elected secretary of the Queensland Operative Painters’ and Decorators Union in July 1915. Held office until 1939, when he retired and was succeeded by Edward John Hanson junior. Wallace was also sometime federal president. He was the centre of internecine disputes between State branches of painters’ unions in the 1910s and 1920s.
• Honorary secretary of the Brisbane Industrial Council up to 1922 when it amalgamated with the Eight Hour Committee. Tried to create unity within building trades unions to forge a more militant stand rather than ameliorative outlook of craft unionism; “one of the very, very few union officials who . . . retained the ideals of their youth and never deviated from the hard and thorny path that does not lead to political preferment or remunerative office”.
• Prominent in One Big Union in Queensland. Secretary of the Communist Party of Australia.
• Militant policies were not always successful, causing union to be deregistered and demoralised in the 1920s.
• Cause of death: coronary disease, coronary occlusion and arteriosclerosis (sudden).

Sources
E. H. Lane (Jack Cade), Dawn to Dusk: reminiscences of a rebel, (Brisbane, 1939), pp. 207-08; Communist, 11 August 1922, No. 75 p.3; D. J. Murphy, R. B. Joyce and Colin A. Hughes, Prelude to power; the rise of the Labour Party in Queensland 1885-1915 (Milton, 1970); John Spierings, A Brush with History: history of the Operative Painters' and Decorators' Union (Melbourne, 1993), pp 19-20, 136 & 142.